5/10/99
BILL FERSTER’S VIDEOGRAPHICS NEWSWIRE
ISSUE 99-15
ABOUT THIS NEWSWIRE
Bill Ferster’s VideoGraphics NewsWire is published weekly and summarizes the important events in the convergent worlds of multimedia, video, animation, chips, mass storage and computers.
Please feel free to forward this NewsWire to someone who might appreciate an item, or heaven forbid, might want to subscribe to it. Please refrain, however, from continually mailing it to others on a regular basis. You can visit my website for more information, as well as read and search past issues of this NewsWire, at http://www.stagetools.com/bill.
Business
---> Media 100 Acquires Terran
In an interesting lateral move, leading NLE maker Media 100 (http://www.media100.com) is branching out towards the DVD authoring market through their acquisition of Terran Interactive (http://www.terran.com), the well-regarded maker of authoring, cleaning, and encoding aids for DVD and MPEG production.
---> New XML Format Aimed At News
A group of news industry organizations have defines a format for encoding news stories, so that their content can be better gleaned via computers. The "News Industry Text Format (NITF)" is a subset of the broader XML encoding format.
---> Chyron Reports Big Loss
CG pioneer Chyron's (http://www.chyron.com) financial picture slid further into the red this quarter with their losing a whopping $2M on revenues of only $15M, which compares to last year's $34K loss on sales of $22M. The loss was blamed on weaker Graphics and Pro-Bel division sales and a $1M loss in revenues due to their sale of the Trilogy division.
---> The End of an Era at Number Nine
Number Nine Visual Technology (http://www.nine.com), who's pioneering 256-color graphics card led the graphics revolution on the PC in the 1980's announced they had replaced company founder Andy Najda as president and board chairman. Looks like he's going to have to join co-founder, Stan, in fun with large earth moving equipment.
BROADCAST / POST-PRODUCTION
---> Pinnacle Supports Speed Razor Editors
Leading video codec maker Pinnacle Systems (http://www.pinnaclesys.com) is now bundling their ReelTime and ReelTime Nitro non-linear editing boardsets with in:sync's popular "Speed Razor RT" editing software.
---> Play to Distribute BBC's Keying Technology
Video-studio-in-a-box maker Play (http://www.play.com) will distribute technology originally developed at BBC that improves chroma keying. The under $1,000 "HoloSet" technology uses a screen made of specially designed reflectors, rather than a unique color to separate foreground from background. A ring, the "HoloRing" is placed around the camera lens that focuses the light around the foreground, eliminating the need for time consuming lighting issues and color spill concerns.
---> Newtek Intro's Video Toaster for NT
The leaders of the revolution in low-cost video effects on the Amiga, NewTek (http://www.newtek.com) has announced a version of the ever-so-popular Video Toaster for Windows NT. The $2,995 "Video Toaster NT" supports uncompressed D1, composite, component, and Y/C video formats, and is bundled with the Speed Razor NLE editor, CG, LightWave VT 3D animation software and their new Aura compositing software.
---> Mitsubishi to Underwrite HDTV for CBS
In order to overcome the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma to kick-start HDTV acceptance in the US, leading television set maker Mitsubishi (http://www.mitsubishi.com) will underwrite 10-15 hours of HDTV production at CBS, at a cost of $25K/hour.
3D TECHNOLOGY
---> 3D Floating point IP Core
Sandcraft (http://www.sandcraft.com), a supplier of MIPS-based IP cores is offering a new microprocessor core that will perform 3D geometry processing. The "SR1-GX" is aimed at set-top boxes and game consoles and sports 1.6 GFLOPS of floating-point performance and integer performance of 800 Drystone 2.1 MIPS and will process popular 2 multiply/add operations per cycle, as well as mixed vector and scalar operations.
---> PixelFusion Gets $15M
Fab-less chipmaker PixelFusion (http://www.pixelfusion.com) received $15M in a private placement investment to help complete their highly anticipated parallel-processing chip. The "FUZION 150" offers 3 gigaflops of processing power for applications such as 3D rendering and image processing.
---> New Networked Gaming Engine
3D rendering pioneer Numerical Design Ltd. (http://www.ndl.com) has integrated their NetImmerse 3D game engine with RTIME (http://www.rtimeinc.com) Interactive Networking Engine.
---> Speech Recognition Source Code
Nuance Communications released the source code to some of its speech recognition software. They have sponsored a forum (http://www.speechcentral.com) to encourage developers to put speech recognition capabilities into their products.
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CYA DISCLAIMER: The preceding NewsWire represents my best efforts to gather the facts and the offering of my opinions. Although I try to describe the world as it appears me, I make no representations as to the accuracy of the reports within, which are gleaned from press releases, print and online magazines and the Inquisit Information Service.
